[editorial note by connor mcknight:]in september of 1970, i moved into a
new flat in bayswater. it has about it an air of what indifferent novelists
invariably call faded gentility. all our neighbours seemed very old and
very quiet, but it was still a nice place. now one evening when i was sitting
on the toilet, of all things, a faint trace of music wafted through the
door, and upon closer listening it bore a great similarity to 'space-age
couple' from 'lick my decals off, baby' - in fact it was 'space-age couple'.'my god, beefheart has made it onto radio
1,' i thought, and all life's certitudes evaporated. i mean, if captain
beefheart can be on the radio then they'll have dan hicks doing the news
soon. fortunately for my peace of mind, when that number was finished i
wasn't greeted by some jerk like terry wogan (can you imagine: 'that was
little old don van vliet, and don would like to tell you the recipe for
his blimp cookies...'?), but by the strains of 'the clouds are full of
wine, not whiskey or rye', but since someone has borrowed my copy i can't
be sure of that.now with piercing logic i grasped that
there must be someone in this building who was playing 'lick my decals
off, baby' and that someone i had to meet - so by dint of a lot of voyeuristic
listening at letter boxes, i tracked it down to the flat below mine, and
with great trepidation i knocked, half expecting a little old lady to come
to the door and scream as by this time i was in a state of frenetic, eye-rolling
curiosity.the door opened and there was just another
long-haired, wild eyed beefheart freak standing there; an instant friendship
developed, and when the band were over here earlier this year i asked tony
if he would like to write it all up. he did, and what follows is the result.
it is a bit of a departure for us since it isn't a fax and info article
at all, but with your customary friendliness, you'll doubtless let us know
if you don't approve.

*

maybe there are all kinds of beefheart freaks,
but two i know about. there's the original got-it-from-john-peel-in-1967
generation - the days of 'safe as milk', the heavy boogie blues band with
the weird singer and the weird words. and there's the 'trout mask replica'
people: fans (is that the right word for a beefheart follower?) who were
prepared to throw themselves into the weirdest stuff around and come up
smelling of sunshine.

now there's a whole new lot of people discovering
beefheart through 'clear spot' and 'the spotlight kid'. doing the heavy
boogie 'safe as milk' thing, but backwards. well, i am somewhere there
in the middle getting squeezed from both directions, but the thing i find
myself getting nearer and nearer to (although i still run away from a lot
of it) is good old 'trout mask replica'.

the point of this ramble is just to say that
even though a lot of people would prefer to forget that captain beefheart
and the magic band ever recorded 'trout mask replica' or 'lick my decals
off, baby', they are there. also to all those people who wish he had never
recorded 'clear spot' but had gone on laying down more 'trouts' the same
thing applies. those far out stuff records exist. nobody is gonna take
them away. keep on ordering your replacement copies and remember: just
because you dig back, it doesn't mean you live in the past. one way or
another this 'clear spot'/'trout' matter came up several times when i met
the band.

some of us may not realise just how much
it costs to make far out stuff records like 'trout mask replica' and 'lick
my decals off, baby'. according to artie tripp (ed marimba), bill (zoot
horn rollo) nearly died and mark (rockette morton) was too starved to get
out of bed for months. they were eating welfare dogmeat. a long way from
the coffee shop of the marble arch holiday inn.

so if any of you think that 'going on tour
with the magic band stars' is a bit like that flo and eddie stuff - you
know: mudsharks and being filmed by andy warhol and truman capote and immortalised
by raoul duke - well, forget it. the nearest thing i got to the big gonzo
experience, was shooting the ticket on the way back from bristol. that's
blackjack. i lost £2 to the captain.

the first thing that hits you about american
tourists of any kind - whether they be little old ladies looking for harrods
or horror-show rock magicians seeking a snort - is that they are incredibly
polite. the british are brought up to believe that they have the most impeccable
manners in the world and that americans are just brash trash. not true.
inside nearly every redneck, hardhat, ivy leaguer or fazed out freak there
is a southern gentleman eager to get out and shake hands. when they're
over here anyway.

and let's face it: on a five week tour of
britain there is a lot you have got to be polite about. the waitresses
in the new motorway service cafes actually apologise before you eat your
food. after they have been open a few weeks they say: 'i just work here'.
but nobody in the magic band could be persuaded to say anything really
nasty about the way travellers are forced to feed in this country. come
to think of it, it may well end up as force feeding. give a thought to
our truckdrivers and travelling salesman.

britain is a little country still trying
to remember how to act big and americans are incredibly polite about it
because they know that it's not really all our fault, that we probably
think it's theirs, so they don't rub salt in. anyway that's by way of saying
that all the time i was with the magic band, they never once made a heavy
complaint about the appalling way we handle things over here. maybe because
we're not armed.

i met captain beefheart after the second
rainbow gig. he was upset by the p.a. growl that messed with the latter
part of the act ["will the audience please stop humming..."] and was drinking
a bottle of courage light ale by the neck and being politely hustled away
by john peel who was giving him dinner in a restaurant that didn't take
orders after 11.30 pm. he was lucky enough to have a paper cup.

backstage at the rainbow is like after a
freak's wedding in a wasted carpark. you look at the ground and expect
to see cider-stained cinders. you certainly feel them in the air. nobody
said anything. maybe they assume we suffer in silence because we just know
something better is going to turn up. micawberism - the creeping british
disease. the most contagious one anyway. don't worry about the revolution/apocalypse/millennium,
man; it will turn up.

anyway, we can't complain because now we
have a full set of holiday inns. the magic band stayed in the brand new
one: a miami-style cheesecake-on-its-side, hidden in there behind the cumberland.
there is another one at swiss cottage. there will be more and more everywhere
soon. watch out for them....

artie tripp was seen wrestling with a rasher-style
steak in the coffee shop. before i told him i was writing this, he informed
me that he was thinking of getting some holiday inn stock. "at least you
know where you are." one of those remarks you can take any way you like.
he also told me that the band had suffered terribly from doing that far
out stuff weird shit music, but more of that....

once the bus was underway and the boys in
the band are shooting the ticket, i cornered the captain. let me tell you
that as i write this, i can still feel his presence. he is one of those
heavy people who is always laughing. his eyes are bright blue and they
burn. he shakes his shoulders when he has made some truly cosmic verbal
outrage and he draws and draws and draws while we chase a thunderstorm
towards swindon. he uses a felt-tipped marker and notebooks of various
sizes with tear-out pages.

the drawings come through fuzzily on the
other side of the paper too, so each picture has a mirror-man image. "some
people like them one way, some people like them the other. there's another!"
he holds up a flock of golden birdies, then a shoal of fish. there is a
primeval tortoise giving a ride to a black-faced rabbit.

"what's he doing there? oh, my god, look
at that poor guy." he has drawn a man with an impossibly lumpy head. "i
write a hundred and fifty pages a day. today i only did thirty." "how do
you do all that and work?", i ask. "wórk?", he says flinching, "it's
all pláy.... some people think it's a terrible thing being a human
being," he says ruminating over the lumphead. "but you don't have to be
weird to be weird." again we are getting into the too far out area. maybe
he still wears the trout mask, but he is into stomping his feet now, boogieing
around the stage, letting some of that funky stuff hang out. maybe it's
because the trout mask was really a carp anyway.

*

after the bristol gig he was interviewed
by a reporter from radio bristol - pete johnston. the captain remembered
him from last time. "what about the possibility that some of your audience
are on hard drugs?", asked pete. pause. "marijuana grows by the road,"
said the captain. not that he was being smart-ass to dumb questions. captain
beefheart talks to anyone who wants to talk to him. backstage at bristol
was like a family party with the local far out freaks jostling with lads
who had come down from cardiff, the bristol bouncers getting autographs
for their daughters and the support band beckett all loosening up together.

the captain has things to say. he doesn't
want interviewers to go away with fleas in their ears and stars in their
eyes. whales of course get their plug. as he said to pete, dogs never used
to go swimming out to sea to catch and eat whales, so why should we do
it for them? "a whale has a fourteen and a half pound brain, think about
that."

captain beefheart has a hawk's eye for animal
oddities. drawing with one of them and watching out of the window with
the other, he spotted a beagle pointing in the middle of a football field.
also a smart tree. "i know a smart tree when i see one." the magic band
lives up in north california where they used to have millions of sequoias
- the giant redwoods - forests of them. "redwood trees purify the atmosphere."
roy estrada told me that there was a lot of oxygen in north california.

people are always pressing the captain to
talk about zappa and acid. i didn't ask him about either but he told a
story about the time he was given a spiked drink during a street acid test
in 1966. it was pure sandoz. one minute he was walking down the street,
the next minute he was all over the universe. and he didn't know why. then
it happened again. another time somebody spiked a drink with some other
[unspecified] stimulant-intoxicant just before he was due to go on stage.

he played and sang for two hours and when
he walked off he literally walked off into the auditorium, right off the
stage, in mid-air. he was that high. he doesn't touch that stuff now....
i didn't ask him about zappa, but roy estrada told me that in the early
'mothers of invention' days when the band wanted to play lots of funky
rock zappa used to stop them and tell them they were ruining his music,
even though it was theirs too.

not far out enough? beefheart probably does
worry about what people think of his current act. he is sure that 'too
much time' should have been a hit single, but maybe not that sure. it wasn't
included in the tour act, because there were no backing singers. he has
had hit problems before. he says there were seven or eight hit singles
on 'safe as milk'. i said, what about 'big eyed beans from venus'? he said
he thought it was a little too far out. artie tripp on the other hand thought
it was "easy to get off on".

there it is again, exactly what is and what
isn't too far out or weird shit? i told him about a 17 year old greek i
had met on an island. a long-hair waiting to go into the army for two years.
he knew all the words to 'lick my decals off, baby'. "hey bill," said the
captain, "come and listen to this." i told the story again. "wow," said
the captain, "that's far out." he thought i had said a 70 year old man.
i wish it had been that way.

beefheart worries like hell on tour. it has
to be right. i watched him do over an hour of testing on the p.a. before
the gig at bristol. "it's got a key of its own," he yelled at the mike,
"can't you hear it?" he belted out some 'low yo yo stuff' and stopped abruptly,
the band did too. he cocked his ear up. "you hear that?" something was
echoing around the hall. "it's too thoroughbred. i can't get intimate with
it."

the problem was solved when beckett's singer
terry slesser lent him his mike. afterwards he asked him what p.a. they
had. "kelsey morris," said terry. "that's expensive, isn't it?," said the
captain. "we couldn't afford one of those right now," terry grinned and
admitted that somebody else had paid for theirs. good old 'bread up front'.
beckett may have been spared their dogmeat days.

the captain told me he had been through 5,000
dollars worth of hohner harps in order to get three right ones for this
tour. now they were almost worn out. he played a few scintillating screams
on two of them to prove his point. the first one sounded incredible. the
second fantastic, and the third out of this world. "they don't make them
like they used to. ever since the beatles."

would he do another double album? yes, but
people can't afford them. "getting this band together is what i want to
do before anything else." "do you extemporise when you record?" "isn't
that a dog's disease?" he is the only man who can sing and whistle at the
same time with a cigarette in his mouth, and make it sound like a moog
synthesizer. "put don preston out of a job," i joked. "that arsehole,"
he joked back in that affectionate way he has of talking about certain
other musicians. the next week he was off to holland to do dutch tv. "a
touch of the dutch," he said, "hey mark, write that down. two ways: 'a
touch of the dutch' and 'a dutch of the dutch'." mark got it both ways.

back home where the big roads flow captain
beefheart drives a 1972 chevy corvette stingray. he used to be a racing
driver; before he was a sculptor. "i can get it up to 170 without it fading
away." something more abrupt than a fade-out stopped them playing their
southend university gig. the roadies pronounced the hall electrically unsafe.

alex snouffer later told me he felt a latent
power surge - as if someone up there was waiting for them to plug in, strike
a chord, and then zitt!: no more magic band. that's something else americans
are politely sure we don't understand here: electricity. so much, that
before he sings it captain beefheart gently recites the words of 'electricity'
to his audience.

some of the venues on this tour were a bit
of a farce, not just echoing ancient victorian barns but brand new ones.
take canterbury, the last gig. it was played in a huge brick shithouse
also used as some kind of basketball gymnasium. presumably there isn't
a concert hall or suitable auditorium there. why not? well because people
up there still think that students are better off playing competitive games
than listening to far out stuff in comfort. they would be better off with
neither, wanking is better than art if it is done better!

anyway, my last memory of canterbury will
not be captain beefheart at all, but the tearful, wasted, bopped out figure
slumped alone at the front of the plywood stage, almost broken-down at
the thought of it all being over for another year. beat your hands raw,
boys. by the way, apart from the short hair that he (connor) displayed,
the captain also digs baggy pants. "i don't want to display my sex organs
in a cloth window."

so, time now to get back to that far out
stuff syndrome. why is it the melody maker said 'clear spot' had no beef,
no heart? why is it some people don't like the captain trucking around
the stage exhorting the audience to 'git up' (he didn't have to at canterbury,
they already were)? why is it that artie tripp says that the next record
will be "even simpler" than 'clear spot'? well, artie - who certainly is
something of the powerhouse that drives the magic band to new boogies -
says that 'alice in blunderland' and 'steal softly through snow' and all
those other far out stuff numbers that were played as encores on the second
night at the rainbow are fun to play but that's all. they leave 90% of
the audience cold and if that happens for long, it's back to the dogmeat.
and we all know that even if we love the idea of an artist starving to
produce his art, would he mind not coughing himself to death on our doorstep?

yes folks, it's cynical money talk time.
for every person that says: 'go on, do another 'trout mask replica',' there
are fifty more who will go out and buy 'clear spot'. maybe people don't
like artie tripp doing his paper-tearing act, or rockette morton wearing
an electric toaster on his head ("a toast from rockette morton") or beefheart
finding and killing a fly on the mike and then dropping it onto zoot's
strings to launch them into 'low yo yo stuff'.

maybe they had rather captain beefheart just
retired to a mountaintop to utter infrequent but world shattering gnomisms.
the truth is that they dropped 'alice in blunderland' and 'steal softly
through snow' from the repertoire. the only far out tune left at the end
of the tour was the set-piece feature duet-duel between rockette morton
and zoot horn rollo, 'peon', but by now everybody can take that.

there's a lot more rhythm around. there is
a lot more guitars: three on most numbers, sometimes all of them with bottleneck
stitching. artie tripp gets through three sets of sticks on 'big eyed beans
from venus' and everybody looked like a crocodile had been sucking it.
the act was less like a dangerous circus. the jokes were more cosy, tv
comedy type jokes. last year at the albert hall the captain wore a blazing
satin cloak and he played a lot of sax. this year he wore a red tee-shirt
with his own head on it, a black leather jacket, baggy corduroys and he
hardly combed his hair. he certainly didn't play the sax. when asked about
that he gave the impression that he is leaving all that weird shit to roland
kirk.

he doesn't like alice cooper's act because
it is mean to animals. sure, he's still a free flow giant tapped into the
continuing cosmical metaphor rolling around the big roof (pseud's corner
entry 341006b) and he sees things coming that some of us might miss on
a pint of peyotal ale. he was here with the heaviest, most musically original
and classy rock band in the business and yet not once when i was with him
did he ever mention the word rock, let alone 'rock 'n' roll'. maybe he
was being obscurely polite again. after all the british talk about it as
if they invented it and it really must be embarrassing for those polite
people from big muddy to hear us going on like the half-brain hicks we
all are. maybe sometimes beefheart sounds like someone who digs dogs and
trees more than he does people. there's a lot of that around at the moment
and you can see why. my only piece of advice on that is that you can't
have congress with a tree and shouldn't need to have congress with a dog.

personally i don't care if captain beefheart
sings from a hammock - all tinselled up like a christmas tree. he has already
been there, sixteen sides of the most electric music ever made. if he misses
a new audience because he thinks he's too far out and goes too far back
to meet them, they should have the sense to cheer anyway. especially here
since we are in danger of becoming a nation of rock critics anyway. next
year the music will be simpler. between then and now he will have been
to japan, and who knows he may record a single like 'abba zaba' or 'big
eyed beans from venus' and rip the charts apart. [both fantasies of
the writer - t.t.]

while hopson & bates ad agency is trying
to persuade the mcc that the good old english game of cricket should go
blow football, long hair and groovy, we can't really expect any sense anywhere,
i suppose, but at least the captain came and he did play some far out stuff
and he took £2 off me towards its upkeep.